In a controversial announcement Yahoo! and American Online are planning on charging bulk senders on some of their email delivery. Of course there was immediately uproar in some quarters.
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Evidently what they see as the way to go about it is to charge anywhere from one-quarter a cent to 1 cent for each message sent for the purpose of verifying that it was wanted mail. The reason they want to do it is so it will help sift through all the spam and cut back on “network-taxing” traffic.
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Goodmail, which is the company that will be providing the service, along with AOL and Yahoo! believe that they can convince the skeptics that it is a valuable service. A lot of companies don’t have any desire to add more costs to their bottom line when now they have the service free.
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Nicholas Utton, chief marketing officer of E*Trade had this to say via email:
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"Having to pay an email provider to conduct legitimate business with a customer doesn't set a promising or productive precedent, and more importantly, doesn't appear to really benefit consumers."
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While spam is a continuing problem and irritation to customers, many of the filters used also block communications that are desired by the consumer.
Goodmail chief Richard Gingras says that there is so much disgust with spam that many people aren’t even opening larger email messages like those from their banks.
While this is obviously a sales pitch by Gingras, nonetheless in the weeks ahead many companies that offer large mailing to their customers will have to contemplate whether the service offered by AOL and Yahoo! are worth the hassle and cost of using.
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